The disillusionment of ten o clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather. 

The reason I love the poem is because it is short and to the point, Wallace Stevens connects the emptiness of the house to the bareness of the people who live inside them. Throughout the poem Steven emphasizes this through repetition and comparison. He also uses metaphysical and dim artistic images. The first part of the poem (up until the eleventh line) is filled with very sad diction with words such as “haunted” and “night” and “strange”, the tone is grim and slow and simple. He begins with describing the actual house, saying that it is haunted with white night gowns… perhaps we can deduce that there are ghosts inside of it, but that is only the literal translation… he compares the humans inside of it to have ghost like qualities. This Implying that humans are cold, dead, and empty. The idea of humans being ghosts is pushed even further where we are described in white night gowns… which are ghost like in appearance. The white could stand for the fact that humans leave dull and boring life. This lack of color (liveliness) is stressed even more by repeating words like “none” and “not”. He then describes the night gowns as not being green or “purple with green rings”… stating that “None of them are strange, with socks of lace”. He highlights that they lack color, that the people lack color and strangeness. Stevens then introduces an old sailor to contrast his life with the life of the plain human, he shows how their dreams contrast. He exclaims that the people of the house will not dream about baboons and periwinkles, that they contain no excitement or oddness. This contrast with the sailor who “dreams of catching tigers in red weather”, the sailor dreams of colors and an odd situation… the red weather which is an unusual description of the environment contrasts with the white night gowns. His dream also depicts him to be a man of adventure and experience, this is different from the people who spent most of their time inside the house, this includes their dreams as well, in describing this house and the people that live inside of it Stevens sheds light on the hollow empty lives most humans live, but he does not do this without giving hope for the future, he does this by introducing a character whose boat beats against the current. He opens the poem with a relatively grim and dreary tone but he ends it on a high note.

Many people believe that the poem is much more simple by saying that the clothes you wear to bed is what your dreams will come from, but I believe it is much more deep and clever. I believe in the first translation because I agree with it… we are all fairly bland people, not in action or character but in experience. Lets do more. 

Hinnom

For this blog, I chose one of my favorite songs of all time, I related it to Winesburg, Ohio. Especially by the tone, mood, setting, and diction of both pieces. 

The song itself is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCxvcv7H9V8

the lyrics are (Fall in

fall out
fall along)

in the first of light
past the Noachide
bodies wrapped in white

stranded every pain
baby, pasts are slain
“I got outta La Grange…”

in Hinnom

all this time
with your heart in mind
didn’t you edit

in Hinnom

go, the least
and the precious feast
the in-vetted

sand it starts to steal
dirt and ice imbed in cheeks
in the potter’s field

solar peace
well it swirls and sweeps
you just set it

strangers scattering
nether passage in the wind
off pennant tension ring

armor, down
on the wettest ground
not to vet it

This song is created by a man named Justin Vernon, who is comparable to George Willard. They were both born in a small town to a difficult childhood, both have the ability of art and words to do something of their life. La Grange refers to a city in Walworth County, WI, about 4 hours from where Justin grew up. This is the area he lived and knew as "home". There is a verse in the lyrics which state.  'I finally did it baby, I got out of La Grange.'" I think this line refers to the deep longing to get out of small-town Wisconsin and make something of yourself. Just as those grotesques wanted to get out of winesburg. This interperatation was a much more literal one. 

Hinnom is also a place where people where sacrificed and buried. It also means land without laws (hell).

I believe this comparison more directly refers to the mood or feeling that the stories of Sherwood's book gives us. I think the author mixes a man experience with women with this place. At the beginning he talks about this man having sex with someone, and without finding it enough he goes to La Grange. La Grange is a prostitute place in an old ZZ top song. 

I like the part that says "all this time, with your heart in mind, did you edit?" as he is asking him if he looked after his heart by doing this. 

An interview more directly states that the lead singer was dreaming of a burial place for strangers near Jerusalem being relocated in the heart of Texas. He explained the story behind the song to UK newspaper The Sun: "When I was working on the lyrics I was coming up with these images of the desert. I had the idea of taking Hinnom, a place near Jerusalem where they have a cemetery for people who don't have names and plopping it into Texas. The song became an amalgamation of this idea and my experience of a Lucinda Williams song 'Fruits Of My Labor.' She sings this line, 'Cause I finally did it, baby, I got out of La Grange, go in my Mercury and drove out west.'

She's actually explaining the end of something, which is actually the beginning of her life. When Lucinda got into the Mercury and drove out west, she was burying the stranger inside her. It's a metaphor for a lot of stuff on the record."-

So this goes in correlation with the first idea, but as with every literary piece, a personal interpretation will always be applicable.

I think the story refers to peoples past, and the letting go of what has happened and looking towards the future. The reason I chose this song as my blog was because I feel like if Winesburg Ohio had a theme song, this would be it. The diction is so surreal and dreamy, the tone is uplifting but so sad. It is an odd mix. And the author of the song plays a lot on the sound of the word rather than what it is… there are many underlying meanings behind each verse.

Research and analysis views of Lines written above Tintern

In chapter 18 Shelley uses a well-known poem written by Wordsworth. Shelley used the poem to establish nature as a therapy, she must have been familiar with the idea as a result of readings for Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Percy probably influenced her as well. In Tintern Abbey, nature is also used as a restorative agent for the speaker of the poem:

While Wordsworth comments on the scene and reflects on the natural setting of his being, Shelley uses this nature as Victor’s personal practitioner. Shelley quotes “Tintern Abbey” at the point in the story when Victor Frankenstein is traveling home with his father after recovering from the illness that overcame him upon learning upon Henry Clerval’s death. If we look at this inter-related texts we can see common similarities, One such similarity is that both contain explicit and detailed descriptions of nature. Both Shelley and Wordsworth use these descriptions to invite the reader in, allowing the reader to enter into the worlds that they have created. If we look deeper into the poem we can see a common similarity between Victor and the narrator of lines written above “Tintern Abbey”. Like Victor, the narrator of “Tintern Abbey” is chased by the fact of something he has done. However, the thing that is chasing him is his wasting his “hour of thoughtless youth” upon the aspects of nature that could be observed visually, and not upon those that required mental examination.  The narrator further professes the impact that his youth spent in nature has had upon his life. While this section of the poem is not actually included in Frankenstein, we can see how it relates to Victor’s story. Even at the end of his life, Victor carries the memories of the people whose lives his creation has impacted or ended. Even through their absence, he has not forgotten them, and he carries them very close to his heart.

But the most common theme between these two stories is romanticism. Although Wordsworths poem was created before Shelleys story, they both were created during the romantic era. This is evident in Victors walk through the woods the passage embodies the emotions that were shown by Wordsworths poems. She expands on the emotion that rage through as Victor takes his walk. These very same emotions are evident in “Lines written above Tintern Abbey”.

One famous line from the poem: “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” speaks about a lover of nature being safe is his surroundings, however, the Creature, even being a lover of nature, is never safe in the world.

    While reading Mary Shelley’s 1818 edition of Frankenstein, several things stood out. One interesting thing to note is that Frankenstein’s creator was vegetarian. When the Creature firsts gets outside and feels hunger, he eats berries instead of trying to kill anything for meat. It is also apparent that he loves nature in the way he describes birds and their songs. if we took Wordsworth’s line as definite truth, the Creature should be safe and sound in the forest and countryside living out his days in peace. 

Lonely and the Doctor.

The Winesburg connection- 

You see, the interesting thing about loneliness and alienation is that we as humans can truly understand the feeling that the characters feel inside the book. In "Paper pills" for instance, we can truly understand the hope that the beautiful wife gave him, he was able to open an entire world filled with his thoughts, his emotions, and his problems. I believe we can compare this to people in our lives who give us the strength and power to open up. The main character in Paper pills is known as Doctor Reefy, he is a doctor who helps people that are dying... in the mean time he writes his thoughts that are "little pyramids of truth" on scraps of paper, I feel like these little pieces of paper are our problems, the struggles that we have to tell with every day. These little scraps of paper represent the hardship and the pain and the suffering that each individual human has to deal with while taking care of those who are dying, ourselves. The beautiful woman, the magnificent, the wonderful woman represents the person that is willing to let you open all those scraps of paper, all the hardship and pain and suffering. And when Doctor Reefy lost that person, he became more desolate than anyone could have imagined.... because now he has to live with those scraps of paper, he has to live with the unbearable truth, the truth that he lives with everyday... the truth that we live with everyday. The fact that human nature is inherently awful, that we are selfish and loathing and jealous, that we are all dying the moment. Once we have lost that person we feel just as Reefy did... alone. His inability to communicate with anyone else is conveyed not only by the paper pills but also by Anderson's description of him sitting all day by a cobweb-covered window in his empty office. Anderson says, suggestively, "He never opened the window. Once on a hot day in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all about it." We will notice throughout Winesburg that many characters seem imprisoned in their rooms. 

I think that by our current society and its expectations... we will all be imprisoned in our rooms, we focus on jobs and money and impressing people... we praise people who do things that we consider rebellious and wrong, yet we forget to chase the most important thing, happiness. You see, the sad thing about Reefy is that he had love for a little, he got the chance to feel that open world, that sadness and pain being lifted off of him. Yet, he knows that he will never taste it again, because death is inevitable, and after losing someone like that,

so is loneliness.